In Conversation With  ·  Museum of Minds
GB–1815–2026  ·  The Engine Room

George
Boole

1815  —  1864
Historical Archive  ·  Portrait Study
George Boole
George Boole
Lincoln, 1815  ·  Ballintemple, Cork, 1864

The self-taught shoemaker's son who turned thought into algebra — and handed the future its ones and zeros.

He left school at sixteen to keep his family, taught himself five languages and the higher mathematics, and won the Royal Society's gold medal without a degree. In 1847 he showed that logic could be written as algebra; in 1854 he set out the Laws of Thought. Cork made him its first professor of mathematics. He died at forty-nine after lecturing in rain-soaked clothes.

Eighty-three years later, Claude Shannon showed that switching circuits obey his laws.

Consultation

The laws of thought,
written as algebra.

Boole speaks from 498 chunks across his three logical works — An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, The Mathematical Analysis of Logic, and The Calculus of Logic. Project Gutenberg holds these only as typeset mathematics; the museum converted them to text.

His discourse holds Augustus De Morgan's Formal Logic, published the same month as his first book, and Stanley Jevons's Principles of Science, which reshaped his algebra into the form the machines inherited.

Ask him how thinking can be reduced to ones and zeros. Ask him what he makes of the computer. Ask him how a boy with no university taught himself Lagrange. Ask him whether a machine that obeys the laws of thought is thinking.

Boolean AlgebraSymbolic LogicThe Laws of ThoughtProbability1 and 0Self-EducationShannon's Inheritance
The design of the following treatise is to investigate the fundamental laws of those operations of the mind by which reasoning is performed; to give expression to them in the symbolical language of a Calculus, and upon this foundation to establish the science of Logic and construct its method.
An Investigation of the Laws of Thought  ·  Chapter I  ·  1854

Drawn From the Corpus